on habitual or social routines like the practice of bringing coffee into the public domain. This fluid territorial stabilisation would not be the same with just any benches or any box – if it existed at all. The precise location, measures, angles, form and distances affect the opportunity to realise this situation and to make it stable. However, the benches and the cabinet are key artefacts in the clustering process that repeatedly takes place at the corner, enabling exchange between strangers.
Platforms give people the opportunity to cluster who, for example, need a rest, want to sit down to eat or drink takeaway, or need a place to put their bags and items they may have bought at the market. Platforms also attract street performers and sometimes mobile (unofficial) market traders. They often allow visitors to be part of multiple and concurrent territorial productions. Hence, they are also sites for exchanges between friends as well as strangers.
Bollards typically comprise permeable boundaries, separating pedes-trians from various vehicles in urban domains. Additionally – and more interestingly for this study – they cluster humans and artefacts in many different ways; for example, they are used as seats, as load-bearing support for various other artefacts and as tables for bags or takeaway items. Occa-sionally they form part of children’s play. They can obviously be applied to a number of requested uses and activities. Some of these affordances can also be associated with building socles, steps/edges, and low walls.
Artefacts and Mobility
With regard to mobility, a preliminary categorisation of artefacts can be made into non-mobile, semi-mobile and mobile artefacts (cf. Hall 1966;
Rapoport 1990:87 ff).1 These categories should be regarded as temporary and elastic – as tools to organise and disclose some affordances associated with specific artefacts, and how these artefacts’ individual competence and significance transform in relation to different clusters and in shifting spa-tial situations. The categorisation is based on the artefact’s presumed mate-rial stability and hence its inherent ability to be transformed, for example by planning and/or design initiatives.
Non-mobile artefacts, such as walls, fences, building socles, platforms, columns, bollards, utility boxes, kerbstones, fixed signs, lamp posts, etc., affect how people move and position themselves in urban space. These kinds of artefacts afford sitting and leaning, which encourages people to
1 Thus, in principle the study confirms the categorisation made by Hall (and followed by Rapoport) into fixed-feature, semi-fixed-feature and non-fixed feature elements.
I have, however, chosen to emphasise the aspect of mobility rather than fixity in this categorisation (in accordance with the dictum that it is fixity, rather than mobility, that is the special case and requires explanation).
linger in a space and thus, passively or actively, interact with other people in the space. Walls have the capacity to effectively separate activities, and thus allow for simultaneous complex uses, which renders greater and more diverse occupancy and exchange, especially when visitors enter or leave a cluster. Non-mobile artefacts that offer horizontal surfaces on which to place things (such as mobile artefacts) increase the diversity of potential actions and uses. Non-mobile artefacts thus afford the clustering of people as well as the clustering of mobile artefacts, such as garbage, vehicles, mar-ket stalls, furniture, etc.
Semi-mobile artefacts, such as benches, litterbins, parked vehicles (cars, bicycles, carts, etc.), temporary signs and posts, market stalls, garden um-brellas, etc., produce territories for specific uses and activities and thereby attract different sorts of people. Artefacts from this category are usually connected to non-mobile artefacts and often dependent on these for their existence and location. Semi-mobile artefacts often stabilise everyday be-haviour or activities, such as the disposal of litter, vending in the market, parking the car, finding the way, etc. A food cart can, for instance, some-times provide a couple of tables to eat while standing or a few benches and a litterbin, together stabilising a chain of buying food - eating it - throwing away the rubbish. This neat composition of practical artefacts – mediated by a set of material actants – makes extensive social exchange possible.
Mobile artefacts, such as takeaway food and drinks, prams, bicycles, mobile communication- and media devices, stools and other lightweight furniture, etc., may prompt people to actively explore an urban space to optimise the material conditions for eating, text messaging, drinking cof-fee, etc.; e.g. searching for horizontal surfaces on which to place things, a shady spot where one can see the mobile screen better, or just looking for a place to sit or something vertical to lean against. Takeaway food and drinks may act as transitional devices, mediating encounters and social exchang-es with other people, sometimexchang-es via semi-mobile or fixed artefacts. The act of sharing the same activity, such as eating and drinking, also brings people closer together and triggers a sense of community (Bell 2007:19);
a temporary collective emerges through an utterly mundane practice. Oc-casionally such parallel activity may provoke verbal exchange: Where did you buy that sandwich? That soup smells good! Do you know where there is a rubbish bin? The material stabilisation of temporal territorial pro-ductions can destabilise social norms and cultures and thus enhance un-planned encounters and exchanges between strangers (cf. Amin 2002:970;
cf. Valentine 2008:330-331). Drinking a coffee or eating a sandwich can also be a reason for hanging around in a public space for a while. This
‘hanging around’ facilitates extended opportunities for exchange (visual
contacts, overhearing conversations, spontaneous encounters, etc.) with others – friends as well as strangers. Mobile chairs and stools allow people to appropriate space in the public domain and thus bring additional ac-tions and exchanges to the place. Chairs and stools in a marketplace can be positioned to obstruct the flow of visitors and thereby cause exchange.
Some stall- and storekeepers use this actant to interact with potential cus-tomers in various marketplaces.
Appropriation Careers
In some spaces, visitors apparently change positions, according to individ-ual or temporal preferences. The phenomenon was first – and most clearly – observed in the Stoney Street/Park Street junction space. A selection of architectural features and artefacts provide potential sites for sitting or leaning or offer horizontal surfaces on which to put things. These spots seem to hold different levels of attraction for different people visiting the site. Outside the Market Porter pub, for example, customers move between the pavement outside the pub, the Monmouth façade benches, the barrels by the entrance and the ‘urban fixtures corner’. When these places are filled up, people start mixing with those using the arcade foundations or just mingle in the middle of the street. Most of the café guests initially colonise the façade benches and the arcade foundations before using the pavement or spaces further away. Some people stay in the area long enough to change position when a preferable place becomes vacant. I consider these gradu-al movements a kind of locgradu-al spatigradu-al positioning careers – appropriation careers – that take place within a given bounded topography. Careers of this kind may be of interest, since they indicate multiplicity and provide dynamic opportunities for different citizens to use the space according to individual and/or temporal desires or needs. For instance, some prefer sun and others shade; some favour exposure while others choose seclusion, and the requests may be different depending on whether one arrives to the space alone or as part of a group. Without a doubt, different visitors may value the same artefact differently, according to individual intentions and projected actions. The artefacts and architectural features also act as po-tential sites for negotiation, sometimes even controversies, and thus they enable direct or indirect exchange between visiting people.
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